My requirements

What I did

After a bit of a Googling, I decided on a piece of a software called webcam. Here’s how I got up and running:

Install webcam

apt-get install webcam

Create a .webcamrc

touch ~/.webcamrc

Example .webcamrc

Run webcam

webcam

Assuming you don’t get any errors your webcam should now be watching for changes. You can view the latest photo at your.server.com/webcam/capture.jpg and a local archive can be found at ~/webcam.

On investigating webcam software that supported multiple webcams I discovered Motion which seems to be the go-to webcam software for Linux that does all the things. After a day of messing about it with I got it working but found it did way more than I needed it to. I’ll stick my config on GitHub when I get the chance.